Childhood Trauma: When Childhood Stories Haunt Us

In “M is for Magic” Neil Gaiman wrote, “Stories you read when you’re the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you’ll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit.”

The only book other than “Dick and Jane” that I recall was used to teach my seven year old self how to read was a book that I remember as, “The Paradise Lost” book. It was a Jehovah Witness text written for children as an introduction to the religion. It contained Bible stories and pictures along with Jehovah Witness teachings. I learned a great deal from that book.

There was one particular story between its pretty orange cover that has lived inside of me for a life time. It was the story of Armageddon, the story of how my fragile little world would end – of how my mom dad, sister, and probably all of my toys would be destroyed in the terrible chaos of an angry God. The God who I was told to love, and taught to fear. I learned my lesson well. I feared him every single day and night of my painful childhood. Each and every one of them.

There was a picture in that book depicting Armageddon. I can still see it clearly in my mind’s eye. I used to dream regularly about the woman in that picture. Surrounded by children in Mrs. Nichol’s second grade classroom, I barely paid attention. I was too busy thinking about the dream I’d had the night before about the beautiful lady with long curly hair who looked up with wide terrified eyes, her arms raised defensively over her head, and her mouth open wide in a frozen scream as the debris of a collapsing building headed straight for her. That picture fueled a little girl’s nightmares, causing her to lie awake at night clinging desperately to her big brown teddy bear, reciting the Lord’s Prayer, and trying with all of her might to not go to sleep.

The night the twin towers fell in New York city, approximately forty years after that first bad dream, I woke up in a cold sweat, heart pounding, and throat aching. The little girl’s helplessness and terror sprang immediately back to life inside of me. Only now, the little girl was lost, and I was the woman with the long curly hair quaking in fear.

We need to pay close attention to the stories our children are being told. Are they stories of hope and love and kindness and beauty? When you’re watching the news, are your children watching too? Are they being bombarded with images of war, and death and destruction? Are they hearing stories of mother’s murdering their own children? Or of a world hurling head long towards ecological disaster and financial collapse? Are they being seduced into believing that their happiness and self worth depends upon the newest toys, technology, and designer clothes? Pay attention now, because they will carry the stories they learn today forward forty years from now, and those stories will either strengthen and sustain them or haunt them….